Doxory?

lakmiseiru has decided Laptop woes again. The hard drive is having problems with any rotational movement (i.e. the laptop is now a desktop). I just paid ~$45 to replace the CPU fan, and a new hard drive is another $75 for a 120 GB model (the best price point). A refurbished model like mine is between $540-690 (for my generation versus the new models), a new one is $1034 including a 3-year warranty. My laptop is 4.5 years old, keyboard a bit sticky, battery kind of sad, but these are less important. I don't really have the money to replace the laptop myself.

Borrowing a 60 GB from a friend (thanks, seph!) for the near future; we'll see how the laptop holds together at this point. Sadly, my grad program is unlikely to buy me a laptop, and most lab stuff in biology works with Macs/Windows :^( Perhaps I'll buy a laptop when I move out west.

Asked 349 days ago

I picked something else

Buy the hard drive and hope the laptop stays good for another year or two.

Ian: If this is your primary machine, I'd say go ahead and get the hard drive so it'll tide you over. Either way it might make sense to ask your father for a new laptop come June-ish.
trs: Highly doubt it'll stay good until June...

jtu, kyrandil, Mycroft, melike, Yoyo, jesse

Mirror the hard drive nightly and hope it stays good until June-ish, then ask Dad for a new laptop for grad school

ternus: Just replace the damn thing.
seph: I might have a spare laptop drive. But it seems like you're well past the point where it makes sense to pour money into this.

tibbetts, kevinr, coolworld, peggusus, kornelius, jgadgil

Skipped (with comments)

photon: Either or, but your grad program should buy you a computer.

If you make a stupid choice because a website tells you to, it's your own damn fault.